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Transience is the backdrop for the play of human progress, for the improvement of man, the growth of his knowledge, the increase of his power, his corruption and his partial redemption. Our civilizations perish; the carved stone, the written word, the heroic act fade into a memory of memory and in the end are gone. The day will come when our race is gone; this house, this earth in which we live will one day be unfit for human habitation, as the sun ages and alters.
Yet no man, be he agnostic or Buddhist or Christian, thinks wholly in these terms. His acts, his thoughts, what he sees of the world around him—the falling of a leaf or a child's joke or the rise of the moon—are part of history; but they are not only part of history; they are a part of becoming and of process but not only that: they also partake of the world outside of time; they partake of the light of eternity.
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER (1954)
TIME AND THE EXPERIENCE OF TIME ARE OF CENTRAL IMPORTANCE IN mental life. Yet psychoanalytic contributions dealing with the subject in more than a tangential fashion are sparse, although there has been some increase in recent years. Despite our vast experience